Don’t Let Negative Feedback Bring You Down

It’s an integral part of doing business and sooner or later you are going to come across it as well if you are an aspiring entrepreneur. Negative feedback can strike at the heart, especially if you are proud of the work that you do, as hopefully you are! It’s important to understand that, as much as anything else due to the law of averages, you are going to come across someone who is displeased with what you do for one reason or another. This does not have to be a client either, it can be someone who takes a completely polar opposite view to a post you may have placed on your company blog. This person will vent about her interpretation in the comments section and may cause your day to become rather unpleasant, quite quickly.

It’s important not to get too upset and to let these things become blown out of all proportion. If you express opinions within the articles that you write, the blogs you post or even the direct content within your webpages, then you must realize that other people will have different points of view. Some people choose to air these differences rather vocally and forcefully, while others are more tactful and subtle. As the old saying goes, it takes all types to make a world and you’re not going to be able to agree with everyone, no matter what you do or say.

If you receive negative feedback as a consequence of your work – maybe some articles that you have written or design projects you have undertaken – then you must analyze the situation. Most of us are taken aback by negative feedback and our natural reaction may be denial or disagreement. Never, under any circumstances, immediately fire back a reply to this person, most especially if he or she is a client, without calmly reviewing the circumstances! It doesn’t matter how nasty the negative feedback can be, you must compose a professional and well thought out response.

Try and understand where the person is coming from. Be honest with yourself as well and own up if you are in the wrong. Don’t be tempted to come up with any number of lame excuses or even made up responses, as even though you may feel justified, you should couch your response professionally and appropriately. Where possible, offer to make amends and in the case of a client, go out of your way to smooth things over as best you can.

It’s quite possible that you will receive some negative feedback and have no idea why this should be the case. Sometimes the person at the other end has their own agenda, a particular issue, or is just having a bad day. They may be choosing to vent their feelings at you or your organization and this is just unfortunate. Don’t be tempted to get into a “catfight” especially in a public forum such as blog commenting. Try and resolve criticism and move on in these cases.

To be a successful entrepreneur you need to have the skin of a rhinoceros and must not let negative feedback get you down. Always have pride in your work and pay attention to detail and the chances are that this kind of feedback will be few and far between.

Do you have a way of dealing with negative feedback?

Matthew Toren

Why You Should Be Blogging

The power of the internet is something any entrepreneur can appreciate. Anyone can now take an idea and turn it into a living and breathing thing with minimal start-up costs and resources. Not only can you launch a product or service right from your own home, but thanks to what some have called the social media revolution, you can also share it with millions of different communities at ease, giving your voice a platform that can’t be matched anywhere else. With such a great opportunity just sitting at one’s fingertips, it may surprise you to know that not nearly as many people take advantage of it. Everyone out there (you reading this right now – yes, you!) should have a blog. Read on to see just how blogging can benefit you, and why blogging is a must for any internet user!

Whether you’re a budding entrepreneur or just a casual reader of the internet, running your own blog can benefit you in several important ways:

Regardless of technical experience, anyone can start a blog with ease thanks to popular blogging platforms such as Wordpress and Blogger, which offer free, low maintenance solutions. Having a blog has benefited me on several different occasions. For anyone starting out, the most important piece of advice I can give is to find something you really enjoy, and then create a blog around whatever that happens to be. Remember to keep it simple and make it fun!

This is a Guest Post by Steve Bellante who graduated with a Management of Information Systems (MIS) degree in 2008. He now works in the IT Infrastructure space while actively pursuing a couple of different entrepreneurial projects and other freelance work in his spare time. He has several years experience in the areas of web development, freelancing, and social media. His blog is TechLifeMashup.com

* Image: Courtesy of kpwerker

Enhance Your Blog with Apture

I recently came across a WordPress plug-in that really puts a bit of spice into your blog postings. In fact, this is one of the most useful plug-ins that we have seen in a long time. Apture basically allows you to insert any form of multimedia or file within your blog post very simply. Once you have installed the plug-in and signed up your account, you can interact with the friendly dashboard and can get quick access to all forms of content to really enhance your blog.

How often have you come across a blog with a lot of great content, but little other than text. As we know, we need to enhance our blog posts with images to keep the readers attention. A page which is full of only text will quickly put your visitor to sleep and you need to insert pictures, images or videos on a regular basis. Apture allows you to do this rather easily. Once you have it all configured, you simply highlight a particular keyword and Apture will automatically pop open showing you related text, images and videos. If you find something that is appropriate, a click or two and the content is inserted into your blog. It can be resized to your liking, but it’s basically as simple as that.

Now, when the reader scans your blog post, he or she can mouse over the highlighted section and a box will pop up including the video, photographs, graphics, maps, audio link or whatever you have selected as appropriate.

This is a much more interesting and much less intrusive way of prettying up your blog. We are all familiar with those plug-ins that simply pop up an advert when you mouse over the highlighted term. Apture pops up more appropriate and informative material that you hand-choose as being most likely to further interest your readers.

In addition to WordPress, Apture is available in a whole variety of versions and will enable you to present a veritable multimedia feast of pop-up links or embeds within every post that you write. You can opt to go to a location on your hard drive and find graphics, additional posts, articles, pictures, slide show presentations – basically you name it. The opportunities and options here are considerable and this solution will take a lot less time than the traditional means of insertion, through your blog platform dashboard.

One of the most useful plug-ins we’ve seen in a long time. What do you think?

Adam Toren

How to use Twitterfeed Effectively

Twitterfeed has long been one of our favorite Twitter tools and is certainly one of the most productive. The guys who run it are very proactive as well and are constantly tinkering and updating its makeup. They boast 350,000 users, including the White House and recent changes to the architecture mean that feeds will be published faster than before.

In a nutshell, Twitterfeed can take your blog posts via RSS feeds and publish them to Twitter automatically or at intervals that you specify. One of the more exciting recent developments includes an integration with the tongue twisting Pubsubhubbub protocol, which promises real-time publishing of posts for those who have Blogger sites and soon, WordPress sites.

You should use Twitterfeed to provide thoughtful, informative, on point post notification to your followers. Develop a process here and don’t just blindly set up feeds into your RSS feeder, spewing out a variety of posts with questionable value for your particular followers.

You need to be sure that your RSS feed makes sense and one way to do this would be to use your Google Reader account to pick and choose which posts you want to share. If you use the Reader feature selectively you can set up an RSS feed just for these selectively-chosen posts and tell Twitterfeed that you want that particular RSS feed to be used. In this way you are hand selecting information that you want followers to see and they will come to view your creations as much more valuable.

While you will undoubtedly only post very good information to your own blog and would be delighted for your Twitter followers to see this, remember that there’s a whole lot of information out there that you don’t know about and which you will in turn find cool and worthy of distribution. Make it a point of searching every day through a whole variety of other informative and keynote blog sites using your Google Reader. By using the aforementioned Twitterfeed set up you will be able to educate yourself and be seen as the provider of top quality material by your avid followers.

Note that Twitterfeed can also automatically publish to Facebook as well and the analytics package enables you to see how many people click through. Special tags are incorporated into each post Twitterfeed publishes and Google Analytics can interpret this information to help you see how your strategy is unfolding.

Do you Twitterfeed?

Adam Toren